You get a sense of a person when you read their writing, and here at The Soap Box, we read a lot of submissions. Since we’ve been able to learn a little bit about all of you, we thought it's only fair if you can learn a little bit about us. We created a “get to know you” survey and distributed it to our team. In the survey, we asked about each other’s inspirations, our literary likes and dislikes, as well as why we got involved with The Soap Box Press to begin with. Be sure to check out our responses, especially for questions about what we look for in submissions if you’re interested in getting published.
Before we get into those answers, let’s meet the fantastic Soap Box team.
First up, we have the Founder and Publisher of The Soap Box, Tali Voron! Tali is a writer, a proud cat owner, a University of Toronto alumni, and in 2019 she completed an MA in the Literatures of Modernity program at Ryerson University. Shelly Zevlever is a blogger, writer and avid reader and is currently working on her Master of Information in Library & Information Science at the University of Toronto’s iSchool. While she is a blogger for Read.Sleep.Repeat for us, she’s an editor extraordinaire! Carine Lee is another one of our talented editors. She was formerly a blog writer and editor for The Spectatorial and she is currently completing her MA in English at U of T.
Lamees is a Master of Science student at U of T with a research focus on extreme weather events in Ontario. She enters the realms of art and literature in her spare time as she enjoys reading, taking photos and noting down inspiring words. Faith Hwang is passionate about inclusivity and diversity within writing and the study of literature. She is currently working as a makeup artist for both MAC and IT cosmetics while studying for her LSATs. Her end goal is to become an immigration lawyer to help those going through the hardships of being a first or second-generation immigrant.
Reilly is an alumna of the University of Toronto and recent graduate of Centennial College’s Publishing program. She’s a multidisciplinary creator with a background in visual arts, literary arts, and theatre. Our Events and Social Media Coordinator is the wonderful Kalen! Kalen is a U of T undergrad majoring in cultural anthropology. They are passionate about community building, social justice, and meeting new people. When they’re not drowning in school work, they like to find out-of-the-way green spaces to explore.
Julia Yan is our computer whiz, b.k.a. our Designer and Web Developer; she’s been coding since grade 10. Fittingly, she studies Computer Science — specializing in Software Engineering — at the University of Toronto.
And there’s Marcus Medford, (that’s me!). I too am a U of T alumni. I’m also a freelance writer, editor and spoken word artist but for The Soap Box, I’m a Writer and Content Creator.
Origin Stories
Now that we’ve met everyone, let’s start by finding out how we all came together. We wanted to find out what motivated each of us to join The Soap Box team, so we asked “Why did you decide to get involved with The Soap Box?” Here are the responses.
Tali: I always felt that there wasn’t a space dedicated to publishing and supporting emerging writers. To help fill that gap, The Soap Box was born. Since founding the press, it has been my mission to make publishing more accessible while also building a strong, supportive, and inclusive community for creatives.
Carine: I was doing my undergraduate degree in English at U of T, and I wanted to get involved with reading and editing outside of my academic studies. Working with my Soap Box Press peers has since become a profoundly rewarding experience.
Julia: I love that The Soap Box Press stands for helping give emerging writers a platform and a voice. Even though I am not a writer, I am an avid reader, and being able to read works of art that I would have otherwise never seen in print is beautiful.
Marcus: I got involved with The Soap Box because I was looking for a community of writers and creatives. In the last couple of months, I’ve been interested in opportunities to write, to meet other writers, and to get a group of people around me to help motivate me.
Kalen: I’ve always been drawn to writing as a form of self-expression. As an immigrant and lesbian, it’s important to me that I have the creative channels to articulate my feelings and experiences, and hope that others enjoy that same catharsis of being able to verbalize their reality. As of late, though, I’ve taken a break from writing: I’ve become more interested in meeting more people and helping create a platform for new authors whose voices deserve to be heard. The Soap Box has been an amazing place for that!
Faith: I joined the Soap Box Press as recommended by Carine during my undergraduate experience at the University of Toronto. I quickly realized that I joined a team that would deepen my appreciation for literature and allow me to gain valuable experiences and connections within the literary field.
Lamees: I have always sought the beauty of language throughout my life. I now love to keep collections of words, including my own, and the words of others. Although I threw away a lot of what I wrote as a child, I realize how important it is to preserve memories or thoughts that tend to fade away so easily! The Soap Box Press is the perfect platform to keep and share beautiful words. I am inspired by both their intent and aesthetic.
Reilly: I was looking to gain some experience editing as it was a career path I was looking to explore further. It’s been an adventure and a fantastic learning experience ever since! My friend referred me to their Instagram account when they had their first open call for team members.
Next, we wanted to find out when everyone started writing and what prompted us to start.
Tali: I’ve been writing roughly since the age of six. Somewhere at my parents’ house is a big shoebox filled with old diaries I’ve kept from grades one through twelve. They’re my most personal and prized possessions, preserving a huge part of my life within their pages. I couldn’t tell you what made me start writing when I was six, but I guess I’ve always seen it as an outlet, whether for personal reflections or for my creativity!
Carine: I first started writing as a child (in the first or second grade). I can’t quite name a specific reason I started to write — I just remember a swirl of ideas that I felt like I had to express in writing, or else they wouldn’t become real.
Marcus: I began writing in grade two with fantastical fictional short stories. I always loved drawing and I began writing because I wanted to come up with stories for the scenes I was drawing. The first poem I wrote happened when I was in grade four, it was a birthday gift for a friend.
Kalen: I started writing when I first immigrated to Canada and had to practice my English. It started out as simple journaling exercises assigned by my ESL teacher, but transformed into full blown personal diary entries. I was only in the second grade and it felt like the move had flipped my life upside down. I think it’s always been about having an outlet, to better grasp my own thoughts and the world around me.
Lamees: I was around six or seven. I wrote a poem on the colour blue and read it to the school. My family was encouraging because my grandfather had been a poet. From then on, I was always motivated to read and write. Also, I kept a diary in which I would write when I was upset or angry. Besides that, I would write poems and stories with close friends and cousins. The creative writing experience for me was an interactive one for much of my childhood.
Reilly: I started writing in middle school. It was when I really started putting my thoughts down on paper instead of keeping them in my head. I’ve always been a storyteller, so it was a natural outlet for me to be creative.
What I’m looking for in a submission is...
Before you submit a piece of writing, it’s always a good idea to read the publication and get a sense of what kind of work they publish. We decided to take it one step further and tell you exactly what elements our editors are looking for as they comb through submissions.
Tali: There’s a lot of good writing out there. A lot. What I personally look for is writing that also makes me feel something. If it sticks in my mind until long after I’ve put it down, a line really resonates and makes me pause, or even something as simple as it gives me goosebumps, I know the piece has done its job.
Carine: A good submission to me is a piece of writing that makes me understand the world differently; I want to be made to see new perspectives or ideas that I would not have otherwise considered had I not read that submission. Ideally, a good submission would make clever use of its form to convey its message. I also love being challenged by what I am reading, so if a particular text evokes an effect of discomfort in a meaningful way, I am likely to consider it in high regard.
Marcus: I’m looking for something that rattles me; something to make me think and feel. Reading a submission and thinking “so what” is the worst feeling. I love when I read something that makes me pause, say “ooof” or compels me to read it again.
Kalen: I would say, maybe, the mental mise en scene that a piece is able to evoke? Regardless of whatever image, feeling, or story that a piece of writing may convey, its ability to imprint itself into your mind’s eye and direct the mental stage is something that’s really important.
Shelly: I’m not too picky on genre or topic but generally I’m looking for something with a great voice (in poetry especially) or something, whether it be a plot or character, that captivates me.
Faith: I love writing that deepens my understanding. Empathy is rare and to me reading and connecting with a character/story/writing is a form of empathy because you step into the thoughts and feelings of someone else. When I read a piece that makes me understand more deeply a perspective or an experience, I know that it is a good submission.
Lamees: I look for novel perspectives and creative writing composition. I value the ability of a submission to invoke an intended emotion. While anyone would love to read a piece with an idyllic tone, you can also appreciate writing that brings more uncomfortable emotions.
Reilly: Creativity, originality, and a message. A message can be something explicitly conveyed within the piece or implied, but I like works where the writer has asked me to think about something or has shifted my outlook on something else, be it the extraordinary or the mundane.
Words to Live By
One of the best parts of reading a book is coming across a quote that speaks to you in some fundamental way. Whether it’s deeply moving and emotional, life-affirming and inspirational, or just supremely well written, great literature is full of great quotes. And just like a person’s writing, what quotes are meaningful to them can say a lot about the values they hold. Here are some quotes that our team lives by.
Tali: “Dream bigger. There’s less competition.” – Unknown.
Carine: “When you’re a kid, they tell you it’s all… Grow up, get a job, get married, get a house, have a kid, and that’s it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It’s so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better.” – Doctor Who, “Love and Monsters” (Season 2, Episode 10).
Julia: “The people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
– Steve Jobs.
Marcus: “I want something good to die for to make it beautiful to live.” – Josh Hommes.
Kalen: “I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.” – Sylvia Plath.
Lamees: “But if the path set before her feet was to be narrow she knew that flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it. Nothing could rob her of her birthright fancy or her ideal world of dreams. And there was always the bend in the road.” – L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables.
Reilly: “People think dreams aren’t real just because they aren’t made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.” –Neil Gaiman “Every storm runs out of rain.”
If a book was written about your life...
Some of you reading this might be in the midst of planning your memoir right now. Well, even if you’re not planning to write a book about your life anytime soon, it’s fun to think about what a book about your life would be called. We did just that and here are our results.
Carine: Possible Abnormalities.
Julia: Anxiously Thinking About All the Things I Forgot (from 5 seconds ago).
Marcus: Mars, the boy from the blue planet.
Lamees: Lost in a land becoming a home.
Reilly: The Mundane Musings of a Life in Progress.
Words of Wisdom
We’ve all been instilled with little bits of wisdom over the course of our lives. We wanted to share some of the best pieces of advice we’ve received and we hope that these gems can apply for both writing and life more generally.
Carine: The best piece of advice ever offered to me was from one of my professors during my undergraduate degree–they told me to pursue things that made me uncomfortable, and to interrogate why they were unsettling. I am now a firm believer in this methodology (whether it be for reading, writing, or otherwise) since I have found that it is in places where you immerse yourself in things you do not understand that learning and self-reflection take place.
Marcus: This piece of advice came from my grade 10 History teacher whom I didn’t like at all. Her advice was, if you’re trying to figure out what you want, start by thinking about what you for sure don’t want, and then keep eliminating things from your list until you’re only left with what you do want.
Kalen: I think the best thing anyone’s ever done for my writing is point out just how academic my prose had become — at some point, without realizing, I had picked up the same voice I use for essays and applied it to more personal pieces. It’s easy for all the different writing styles to blend together, especially as a social science student who spends more time writing essays than not. But I’m working on un-learning that pedantic, analytical voice.
Lamees: Each passing year, your job is to become better at being who you already are.
Reilly: Don’t take criticism personally. Keep doing what you’re doing, learn from the opinions of others, but the moment you take it personally, creating becomes a battle when it should be an adventure.
Are there any books you’ve read that have had a significant impact on you as a writer?
Carine: Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman is a large influence in my writing of short stories. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye did not have a significant impact on my writing per se, but I see it as a prime example of how to represent horrific violence through aesthetically beautiful language, while still avoiding the sanitization of this violence.
Julia: I am not a writer, I don’t write beyond what I have to (which pretty much is just code and this), but books have changed how I see writers. One of the most impactful books I have read is Turtles All the Way Down by John Green. Green gave us an insight into the mind of someone with anxiety and resonated with me in ways I didn’t know possible. I finally saw a character’s mind so similar to how my own mind works, and it made me feel safe and comforted. I saw how writing could make me laugh, cry, and feel every emotion in between.
Marcus: On Writing Well by William Zinsser. It was required reading for one of my Intro to Journalism courses at UTSC. There isn’t a specific piece of advice that stands out as particularly impactful but the book helped me to think more intentionally about what I was writing and how.
Faith: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. The novel changed the way that I thought someone could write about a traumatic experience. The way that Toni Morrison wrote on traumatic events sounded almost poetic within the novel.
Reilly: Definitely Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion by Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as the classics in my life, as well as The Watchmen by Allan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
Alternative Media
They say the key to being a good writer is to read a lot and to read a wide variety of material. In addition to the poems and manuscripts we read, we also enjoy the writing of these other forms of literature.
Tali: It is so hard to write a good speech. I admire anyone who can write - and deliver - a speech that takes me through a range of emotions; if I’m laughing one minute, tearing up at the next, and I leave inspired, it’s a job well done.
Carine: Lately, I have been getting more invested in reading literary theory/criticism, especially those that offer insight into social issues. I also enjoy a well-written film or television show.
Marcus: I really appreciate a good, well-written commercial with good acting. I will purposely avoid products and companies with bad commercials.
Kalen: I love thinkpieces. And to be honest, I’ve always been big on non-fiction in general. Whether it be thoughts on a certain policy, bringing particular social inequalities to light, or just a personal story about self-understanding and growth, I could spend hours reading those little bites of opinion, analysis, and theory!
Shelly: I really like graphic novels and comics. In addition to the classic superhero story, I really enjoy novels and memoirs that are illustrated. Some favourites include March: Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell and The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang. I also really like poetry. I don’t get a chance to read as much of it as I should but every time I do, I’m always awestruck by the ways in which people can really do magic with words.
Reilly: I love reading plays, graphic novels and comic books, and academic journals (psychology and philosophy in particular).
Eye of the Designer
Reilly does great work, including designing our covers, and Julia, our developer and web designer, has a great eye for detail. We asked them both what they think makes for a good cover, check out their responses.
Julia: I think the most important part of a cover is making it visually stimulating while
getting the theme or message across. I am a simple person who usually doesn’t think deeply about the cover or title of a book, but seeing the title reflected in the cover art or seeing “easter eggs” in the cover is enjoyable and keeps me interested. I know, “don’t judge a book by the cover”, but as it’s the first thing anyone sees it is pretty much impossible not to.
Reilly: The covers I tend to admire are the more simple, yet graphic ones or one that focuses on a very abstract image or element of the work that sparks my interest.
What’s something on your bucket list?
Tali: Clichéd but fitting, I’d love to write and publish a book of my own.
Julia: Travel to each continent (hopefully most countries) and explore the culture and food.
Marcus: Visiting Marcus Island (Minami-Tori-shima) it’s a part of Japan but it’s in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Reilly: Having a novel published.
About the Craft
Lastly, we took some time to reflect on quotes from writers about the craft of writing.
“ We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ― Anaïs Nin
Tali: I think of writing as a way to preserve a piece of yourself at that moment. The act of writing has always been a form of release for me. Whenever I go back to read something I’ve written, especially if I’ve had some distance from the piece, I’m always amazed at how easily I’m able to remember what I was feeling while writing, what was happening in my life at the time, and specific details that I likely would have forgotten otherwise. It’s exactly as Nin suggests: we write to process the moment first, and then to be able to relive it through reflection.
“A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (...) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.” ― John Fowles
Kalen: If you had to define postmodernism without giving an outright definition, this quote would be it. Language is a difficult and imperfect project, a tussle of what becomes eventual understanding between speaker and hearer. A word is only able to signify a general concept: wherever it may be taken depends on whichever one of the countless subjectivities it meets.
Reilly: I agree with the meaning of the reader-writer relationship, but also believe it is the writer’s responsibility in certain forms of literature to ensure the reader is able to
arrive at the intended destination without getting lost along the way.
“Writers must keep spilling their guts to the public until they go from saying ‘that’s gross’ to ‘Wow, look at that! Show us more!!’ ‘Put it away, we’ve seen it before.” ― Stewart Stafford
Marcus: This quote makes me think of the career trajectory of creatives and entrepreneurs as well as the need to constantly change and improve to satisfy your audience.
“A poet should be passionate about the reader’s experience. Each reader should be transformed by every poem.” ― Emily Weis
Julia: I think a poem’s job isn’t to necessarily transform the reader, but to make the reader feel something. Poems, I think, are designed to emit emotion in a few words; if a reader leaves just feeling a certain way, I think the poem has done its job.
Reilly: I agree completely. I feel like I’m in a chrysalis while reading, ruminating on meaning and intention, and leave the last line as a butterfly. Transformation doesn’t need to be beautiful. I appreciate the works that challenge us and make me feel something that needs to be unpacked a bit more… sometimes ruminated on and explored through another creative form.
So that’s us at The Soap Box! We hope you’ve gotten to know us a little bit better. Get in touch with us and let us know what you think of our answers and feel free to answer the questions yourself and share your responses!